I think pointing out the hypocrisy and biases of politicians and their advocates isn’t productive. Both sides suffer from confirmation bias. People would rather retweet “Trump criticizes Trump” tweets than do anything that moves the needle. Or perhaps that’s catharsis. Either way, catharsis isn’t enough.

Without getting into their motives - racism, fear, economic anxiety, any other anecdotal thing people cite after reading Hillbilly Elegy and Dreamland - the right is winning. One gets the impression that Young Democrats see 30k retweets and feel satisfied on a matter.

BOTH SIDES! The rally cry of every Trump supporter as a justification for supporting a racists [expletive] bag.

Totally not talking about you though, not attacking the poster, just attacking the message.

Pretty good interview with a South Korean born peace advocate/activist.

The bolded seems like the most pressing concern to me:

Quote:

Sarah: Given how volatile and dangerous Trump is, it seems to me that if you don’t trust him, you should do everything you can to make sure that he doesn’t derail the peace process. This is the same person who casually threatened to annihilate the entire Korean peninsula with nuclear weapons, yet now some Democrats are pressuring him from the right. Do you think this is dangerous?

Christine: It is very dangerous to pressure Trump to be hardline. We have to put all of our efforts into ensuring this goes well and is not undermined. Look who's in Trump’s cabinet: John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and tomorrow is the confirmation meeting for Harry Harris, the former head of Pacific Command—a military man with a hardline position against China and North Korea, now likely the new ambassador to Korea.

We are in an incredibly dangerous situation. We saw that Lindsey Graham ask senators to join him in authorizing the use of military force in North Korea if this process does not succeeed.

Talking with various members of Congress on the Hill, I got the message that they oppose this but they don’t have any path to success—and they oppose this because they don’t trust Trump. There’s this trope that we don’t engage with dictators. Really—we don’t engage with oppressive regimes? What about Saudi Arabia and Israel? The hypocrisy is just beyond the pale.

Democrats are attacking Trump from the right and sticking to this hard line of no dialogue, no engagement. This is the same line that was used against the Iran Deal. When I went to meet with Nancy Pelosi's office, I felt like I was dealing with the Obama administration. They had this line of, “We're not going to engage.” That's gotten us nowhere except a nuclear armed North Korea.

Speaking in a wood-paneled office aboard Air Force One, Baier put it to the US president that Kim was “a killer. He’s executing people.”

Trump replied by praising Kim as a “tough guy. Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, with tough people, and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have – if you can do that at 27 years old, that’s one in 10,000 could do that.”

Trump went on: “So he’s a very smart guy, he’s a great negotiator and I think we understand each other.”

Quote:

Baier, sounding taken aback by the president’s flippant response, pressed Trump on the issue: “But he’s still done some really bad things.”

To which Trump said: “Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things. I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.”

North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to American intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Trump claims to have neutralized the North’s nuclear threat.

The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.